Preparation of two International Workshops

Maria Backhouse: Green Grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon

The term green grabbing was first used by John Vidal (Vidal 2008) and discussed in a special issue of The Journal for Peasant Studies as a new capitalist form of the appropriation of nature (Fairhead et al. 2012). According to the authors, the term ‘appropriation’ means ‘the transfer of ownership, use rights and control over resources that were once publicly or privately owned – or not even the subject of ownership – from the poor (or everyone including the poor) into the hands of the powerful’ (ibid., 238). More